Another fatality has occurred at the hands of Chicago gang violence.
This time, the victim is 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee.
As the Chicago Tribune reports, Lee was walking to his grandmother’s house on Monday when he was lured into an alley on the South Side where he was shot and killed.
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said that the murder was “probably the most abhorrent, cowardly, unfathomable crime that I’ve witnessed in 35 years of policing” in a press conference on Thursday.
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Multiple reports have suspected that Lee’s murder may be in connection to his father’s own history of gang-related activity.
“If it wasn’t a target, he wouldn’t have got hit so many times in the back and the face,” said the boy’s father, Pierre Stokes. “I think he was targeted.”
In 2014, Stokes was released on parole after pleading guilty to a 2011 armed robbery charge in which he was sentenced to six years in state prison.
While Stokes reportedly isn’t cooperating with the police, investigators do believe that he knows who is involved in his son’s murder.